be
made the pretext of a dreadful revolution, they were not only almost
exempt from contributing to its relief, but were enriched by the common
distress; and while the rest of their countrymen beheld with unavailing
regret their property gradually replaced by scraps of paper, the peasants
became insolent and daring by impunity, refused to sell but for specie,
and were daily amassing wealth. It is not therefore to be wondered at,
that they were partial to the new order of things. The prisons might
have overflowed or been thinned by the miseries of those with whom they
had been crowded--the Revolutionary Tribunal might have sacrificed half
France, and these selfish citizens, I fear, would have beheld it
tranquilly, had not the requisition forced their labourers to the army,
and the "maximum" lowered the price of their corn. The exigency of the
war, and an internal scarcity, having rendered these measures necessary,
and it being found impossible to persuade the farmers into a peaceful
compliance with them, the government has had recourse to its usual
summary mode of expostulation--a prison or the Guillotine.*

* The avarice of the farmers was doubtless to be condemned, but the
cruel despotism of the government almost weakened our sense of
rectitude; for by confounding error with guilt, and guilt with
innocence, they habituated us to indiscriminate pity, and obliged us
to transfer our hatred of a crime to those who in punishing it,
observed neither mercy nor justice. A farmer was guillotined,
because some blades of corn appeared growing in one of his ponds;
from which circumstance it was inferred, he had thrown in a large
quantity, in order to promote a scarcity--though it was
substantially proved on his trial, that at the preceding harvest the
grain of an adjoining field had been got in during a high wind, and
that in all probability some scattered ears which reached the water
had produced what was deemed sufficient testimony to convict him.--
Another underwent the same punishment for pursuing his usual course
of tillage, and sowing part of his ground with lucerne, instead of
employing the whole for wheat; and every where these people became
the objects of persecution, both in their persons and property.

"Almost all our considerable farmers have been thrown into prison;
the consequence is, that their capital is eat up, their